Yeah, I’m proud of the “day in the life” front page of the old site, and plan to find a way to incorporate it on this site somehow.

Being in total control of the sites design and inner workings is what I liked about having a “hosted” website. I am not in total control of this site, but it is way easier to manage, looks better, and it is more secure for visitors. There is a big push for the web to go to “https”, and I could either pay double my hosting fee for an SSL certificate, or move here for half the cost of hosting… so here I am.

I am attempting to turn the Rachel Meets Ariane short story into a game with some different paths and endings. The first three parts have been converted to the game, but working on the fourth as there are paths that will take you to new content I have yet to write or illustrate.

It’s a download (although I know of two online versions available). If you are on a computer click “Date Ariane” at the top of the page for the download screen. If you are on a mobile device, click the hamburger menu (looks like ≡ ) and click Date Ariane. There is no IOS version due to Apple restrictions.

On the FAQ webpage for Date Ariane, you mention the folder for savegame data on Windows is “c:\users\(your login name)\AppData\Roaming\RenPy\dateariane” and don’t specify it for Linux or Mac OS X.

Actually you should update this to “%APPDATA%\RenPy\dateariane” on Windows, that way it always has the correct folder on all versions of Windows including older ones that use “Documents and Settings” instead of “Users” and also works if user data is stored on some other drive than “c:”.

On Mac OS X, the savegame data folder is “~/Library/RenPy/dateariane”. On Linux and other operating systems, the savegame folder is “~/.renpy/dateariane”.

For Something’s In The Air’s FAQ webpage, those directories are the same except replace “dateariane” with “arianebcomsita” at the end of the directory names… so they are “%APPDATA%\RenPy\arianebcomsita” on Windows, “~/Library/RenPy/arianebcomsita” on Mac OS X, and “~/.renpy/arianebcomsita” on Linux.

These are guaranteed to be the correct folders for savegame data. This information comes from the RenPy documentation website at https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/config.html and I have confirmed that it is correct on Mac OS X.

Also, could I suggest that you put out a new Max OS X package for Date Ariane that has the correct Date Ariane icon bundled in the .app file? You correctly bundled the icon in the .app file for Something’s In The Air, so obviously you know how to do this, it was done perfectly for Something’s In The Air.

Date Ariane just uses the usual RenPy icon (the anime/manga girl with pink hair)… well at least prior to being launched. After being launched, while it is running, Date Ariane shows its correct Date Ariane icon, but then once the program is closed, it goes back to the RenPy icon again (at least on Macs). I have nothing against the default RenPy icon, it is kinda cute, it just seems like an unintentional mistake to have it not be the same icon as when the program is running, and also the girl with the pink hair doesn’t appear even once in the game so the icon might be a little confusing to users.

Also I need to add something else I discovered. On Mac OS X, in both games, the savegames are actually stored in 2 different locations! This makes it really hard to delete your savegames and reset the persistent data since it has to be deleted in BOTH locations to reset things on a Mac.

The first location is “~/Library/RenPy/dateariane” for Date Ariane and “~/Library/RenPy/arianebcomsita” for Something’s In The Air. The second location is the .app file for the game itself, “Date Ariane.app” or “Somethings In The Air.app”. On a Mac, .app files are sort of like .zip or .cab or .jar files, in that they are actually compressed files containing files and directories compressed inside of them. Just one file in the .app file (typically without an extension) is the executable program itself, and most of the other files inside an .app file are data, and programs can store settings and saved data inside their .app files.

Apparently RenPy uses BOTH subdirectories of “~/Library/RenPy” AND the .app file for a RenPy game on a Mac to store savegames and persistent data. So to reset a game and delete persistent data and delete savegames, the savegames or persistent data has to be deleted from the subdirectory of “~/Library/RenPy” and the .app file has to be deleted and replaced with the originally downloaded version. If the data is deleted from one of those places but not the other, RenPy restores the data from where it has not been deleted on the Mac.

This doesn’t seem to occur on Windows, Linux, or any non-Mac systems as far as I know, this storing of RenPy data for a game in 2 redundant locations just seems to happen on Mac OS X (which Apple is calling macOS now). Anyway it is good for users to keep the original download in their Downloads directory so they can restore the original .app if needed (along with deleting data from “~/Library/RenPy” if needed). That way people can start out from no achievements at all and re-earn them, for more replayability. Also it seems that in a Mac command shell, the “~” at the beginning of a directory name should be replaced with the text “$HOME”, so in the command shell the 2 directories for savegames and persistent data are “$HOME/Library/RenPy/dateariane” for Date Ariane and “$HOME/Library/RenPy/arianebcomsita”. Also the quotation marks used in a command shell have to be regular vertical ones like “, not opening or closing ones like “ or ”.

Anyway the command “rm -R $HOME/Library/RenPy/dateariane” removes Date Ariane game data from one of the 2 locations and deleting Date Ariane.app and replacing with the original downloaded one removes the game data from the other location and allows someone to restart the game. Similarly, the command “rm -R $HOME/Library/RenPy/arianebcomsita” removes Something’s In The Air game data from one of the 2 locations and deleting Somethings In The Air.app and replacing with the original downloaded one removes the game data from the other location and allows someone to restart the game.

Typically applications (.app files) are in the “~/Applications” directory (a.k.a. “$HOME/Applications” from the command shell). But actually users can put them in other directories too on a Mac so they aren’t guaranteed to be in that location.

Oh and my stuff about $HOME applies to the all the commonly used command shells that work on Mac OS X: bash, zsh, fish, tcsh, etc. They all seem to use the same syntax for environment variables, thankfully. Their syntax for some other things is not the same but luckily this is not a problem here.

If people try to view the Library folder for their current user account in Finder, however, it is a hidden directory; the easiest workaround for this is to go to the Go menu in Finder and choose Go To Folder, which has the keyboard shortcut Shift-Cmd-G. This allows someone to type or copy and paste the name of any directory and browse it in Finder, including the current user’s Library directory and its subdirectories which are where the RenPy save game and persistent data is stored.

Another workaround is to use the command “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES” from a shell command prompt and then to restart Finder.app by holding the Alt/Option key, then holding the mouse over the Finder icon in the Dock and choosing Relaunch… or for another way to restart Finder, click on the Apple menu in the upper-left corner of the screen, go to Force Quit, choose Finder, and click Relaunch. This permanently changes Finder to show hidden files and folders, and then it is quite easy to simply browse to any folder you want and see the files, and the fact that the Library folder is hidden no longer poses any problem.

If somebody wants to change this back so hidden files are once again hidden in Finder (maybe to hide them from other people who use the same computer so they don’t mess it up), the command “defaults delete com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles” makes it so hidden files are hidden, and then after that Finder needs to be restarted/relaunched for the setting to take effect as in the last paragraph.

Anyway I know that is a little bit long to go on the FAQ pages, I just wanted to explain how complex the situation is for RenPy savegames and persistent data on Mac computers and how to deal with it, you can maybe summarize it… and my previous comment covers Windows and Linux fully as far as I know, thankfully for Windows and Linux users it seems they have a MUCH simpler time of things when it comes to savegame data than Mac users. It took me a lot of trial and error and experimenting along with research to figure all the details of this out. And maybe some of the information I included might be unnecessary for people who want to delete their savegame data and persistent data, I am not sure.